A Dark Soul-crushing exercise in pure, sustained terror

From Software’s Dark Souls is a videogame in the purest and most impenetrable sense. It is a game that doesn’t push you over the finish line. Every time you vanquish an enemy it doesn’t shower you in plaudits and encouragement, it delivers something far more fulfilling and tangible: real satisfaction. Much has been said about the Soul’s games crushing difficulty and yes, there is a learning curve steeper than any game of recent memory within the first five minutes. However, break through this and accept the truth that the weediest ghoul wearing a nappy can kill you in a couple of flurries of his rusted sword and you will be swallowed whole by the beautiful, life-consuming darkness of Dark Souls.

There is very little in the way of plot exposition which further pushes that Dark Souls is a game and does not adhere to the rules of narrative that films and television do. As with all games, though it is all too little the case, the story should come from the player having control over the action. That is what games have that no other entertainment medium can challenge, the player moulds the story out of the tools they have been given. That is what Dark Souls does better than any game: It is perpetually weaving tales of terror, survival and victory on the fly. 

The difficulty of Dark Souls allows no room for mistakes or half-arsed gaming creating an unavoidable sense on immersion. Dark Souls forces you to follow its rules: you get stabbed – you die, you roll off the crumbled brickwork of a spire – you die, you back down a narrow corridor and try to swing your sword at your enemy only for it to clash with the wall you’re pressed up against - your enemies flail at your helpless torso, you die. Are you starting to see a pattern? As much as it may seem so to the neutered gamers used to only jumping when Naughty Dog wants you to, this is not unfair. It is very much the opposite. Harsh but unwaveringly fair. Each successive enemy you defeat leaves you with a quiver of pride and relief for your accomplishment because you, you with total control of your chosen weapon killed his soulless arse. This is all achievable due to the precise and responsive combat. After thirty or so hours when you feel you’re starting to get the hang of the mechanics, you begin to teach yourself the exact length and weight of each swing of your sword to exact your revenge on the bastard that the naive, twenty hour younger version of yourself carelessly waltzed into. This being Dark Souls he promptly cut you down while looking aspirational in his awesome, black plate metal armour.

This leads on to Dark Souls most progressive facet: its unique online integration. After your carefree bandit into uncharted territory goes unavoidably awry, you leave a charming bloodstain marking to other lonely wanderers that they don’t have it as bad as you. Yet. Approach the stain and you can touch it revealing the last moments of the doomed players existence. Perhaps this warns others of the dangers just round the next corner or prompts them to think “why the hell did they take a running jump off that cliff face?” Not all of the wealth of interconnecting online options are there to aid your bleak progress. Another of the most notable of the online features is that of the message system. It boils down to an in-game Twitter system that allows you to leave prescribed scribbles of help, hope and appreciation. Be wary though because after being lead to many deaths with promises of salvation and goodies it would seem that, as if we needed reassuring, a lot of folk who play games are twats.

The fact that all Dark Souls games are threaded together also allows for the most hideously tense experience in gaming: Invasion. Your insecure feeling of stability in Lordran can be shattered in a split-second by the knowledge that somewhere in the world around you a player has invaded your game. A dark figure lavished in a shimmering, blood-red mist approaches you, he bows silently, draws his sword out of magic before your eyes, your stomach sinks and then you ready yourself. Controller sweaty in your mitts, you return the solemn salute. After a fairly embarrassing dance around your adversary you attack only to fall into his defence thus lowering yours. He cuts you down. “You were defeated” stains your screen again. Your manic trembles subside and you slump back in your chair gutted. But you are left with something that other games can only provide the illusion of: a goal. A personal vendetta against the game and, with the knowledge of an entire die-hard community invisibly by your side, you are drawn back in for the most compulsive exercise in sustained terror and immersion of this millennium.

A less than dangerous method of filmmaking - A Dangerous Method

David Cronenberg is not a director who makes ordinary films. In fact his films are often extraordinary both in subject and design. A Dangerous Method is the director’s most ordinary film to date. Even the miss-step that was M.Butterfly had a certain degree of sensual allure and ambiguity to it. With his latest film Cronenberg sets all his cards on the table from the off. To a certain extent the film was inevitable when looked at against the progression of Cronenberg’s career. From the visualisation of Nola Carveth’s rage in The Brood to the debate on the video nasty scare with Videodrome, the Canadian director is known for tackling themes of mutation, infection and identity and visualising his subject through exploding heads (Scanners), sexually transmitted slugs (Shivers) or stomach-vagina-VHS-players (Videodrome).  Over the years Cronenberg has taken on various forms of psychosis in increasingly literal ways most notably in A History of Violence and his most underrated film, Spider. A Dangerous Method is the most literal application of Cronenberg’s fascination with the mind and its machinations. The similarity with Spider is what makes A Dangerous Method’s greatest flaw all the more prevalent: Cronenberg’s inconsistent and misjudged direction. Much issue has been taken with Keira Knightly’s gurning, jaw-jutting performance of which Cronenberg assures were accurate symptons of the psychosis that Sabina suffered from. It is not so much her performance, which is by no means outstanding, that is the issue but rather the position she has in the film. Sabina is in the role that Cronenberg would have assigned to Brundelfly in The Fly or the mugwumps from Naked Lunch. Such characters were gruesome visualisations of the trauma that other or other versions of characters were going through. These were made up from special effects and prosthetics. As with something that is ostensibly a doll, the pain that they are going through can only be shown from the exterior. This is fine when you have Seth Brundle to flesh out the humanistic angle prior to the metamorphosis; however, Sabina is perpetually this figure within the film. She is the psychosis that the film revolves around rather than the character. This highlights what Cronenberg got so right in Spider and so wrong in A Dangerous Method: Ralph Fiennes performance is submerged and we feel the weight of his state of mind out of our insecurities of the character. This is impossible with Sabina as there is no room for interpretation and, yes, perhaps this is due to the fact that what we see of Sabina’s distress is more accurate than that of Spider’s but this is irrelevant if it is considerably less engaging. A Dangerous Method boils down to a period drama, a slice of history told with no inspiration or ingenuity. Cronenberg was rightly granted the ability of auteurist creative control after his commercial and artistic cross-over successes of the late 70’s and 80’s. He maintains this position though needs to reassure that he can still treat a subject with the same degree of ambiguity and brash imagination as captured so well in dozens of prior films and, perhaps, with his upcoming Cosmopolis, he will.